Mere Quotes

Freedom was born in Greece because there men limited their own freedom. ... The limits to action established by law were a mere nothing compared to the limits established by a man's free choice.

Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.

The difference between psychedelia and digitalia ages will seem like a smooth blending in years to come and will be a mere blip on the screen.

There is this value in books, that they enable us to converse with the dead. There is something in this beyond the mere intrinsic worth of what they have left us.

For 'Tis not in mere death that men die most.

A solitary life cherishes mere fancies until they become manias.

Whatever we read from intense curiosity gives us the model of how we should always read. Plodding along page after page with an equal attention to each word results in attention to mere words.

Judgment is affirmation with the intention to thereby affirm competently enough, and indeed aptly. That distinguishes judgments from mere guesses.

Truly smart technologies will remind us that we are not mere automatons who assist big data in asking and answering questions.

Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances.

To jump and break the sound barrier will not be a mere record breaking experience or another extreme event that ends once the mission is accomplished.

But we may go further, and affirm most truly, that it is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends; without which the world is but a wilderness.

Aristotle... a mere bond-servant to his logic, thereby rendering it contentious and well nigh useless.

Do you think that it is possible to have a mere taste of commonness? Either one hates it or makes common cause with it.

Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object?

Swear words and profanities are mere abbreviations of speech, similar to the abbreviations in writing.

There is a goal but no way; what we call the way is mere wavering.

Alow immortality to work through you. Be but a mere instrument. And that instrument should be so absorbed in the perfect perfection of existence, that it knows not even that it is absorbed.

We have the possibility of being far removed from what we are, of beginning to taste it and feel it. That is direct knowledge. That is truth. Anything else is mere words.

Good teachers are not known for telling you what you want to hear, and consequently they're rarely popular because they tend to offend people on a regular basis by their mere presence on earth.

A pen and a notebook and a reasonable amount of discrimination will change a journey from a mere annual into a perennial, its pleasures and pains renewable at will.

It is not the mere station of life that stamps the value on us, but the manner in which we act our part.

In my opinion, using different kinds of epithets and adjectives in connection with the word democracy is a sign of mere hypocrisy, to put it mildly. Either there's democracy, or there isn't.

Careful amidst the careless, amongst the sleeping wide-awake, the intelligent man leaves them all behind, like a race-horse does a mere hack.

The rules of grammar are mere human statutes, which is why when he speaks out of the possessed the Devil himself speaks bad Latin.

Pain warns us not to exert our limbs to the point of breaking them. How much knowledge would we not need to recognize this by the exercise of mere reason.

It is the inefficiency and sham of ... our schools ... that save us from being dashed on the rocks of false doctrine instead of drifting down the midstream of mere ignorance.

If you deliver an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get fond of it.

Often the soul is ripened into fuller goodness while age has spread an ugly film, so that mere glances can never divine the preciousness of the fruit.

I easily sink into mere absorption of what other minds have done, and should like a whole life for that alone.

There are moments when our passions speak and decide for us ... like a fire kindled within our being to which everything else in us is mere fuel.

Education has a larger function than the mere communication of knowledge.

It is not the mere study of the Law, but to become eminent in the profession of it, which is to yield honor and profit.

Let experience solve it. To listen to mere speculation in such a case were criminal.

One of the most visible effects of a child's presence in the household is to turn the worthy parents into complete idiots when, without him, they would perhaps have remained mere imbeciles.

I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.

You explain right well, and you shew that you understand argument and are not a mere sophist since you accept that which cannot be denied.

The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.

A mere chronicle of observed events will produce only journalism; combined with a sensitive memory, it can produce art.

it isn't mere love and good-will that is needed in a sick-room; it needs knowledge and experience.

Whatever offices of life are performed by women of culture and refinement are thenceforth elevated; they cease to be mere servile toils, and become expressions of the ideas of superior beings.

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up.

Ninety-nine one-hundredths of our lives we are mere hedgers and ditchers, but from time to time we meet with reminders of our destiny.

I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see men in herds for all them.

Color, which is the poet's wealth, is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.

That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience.

Man must be doing something, or fancy that he is doing something, for in him throbs the creative impulse; the mere basker in the sunshine is not a natural, but an abnormal man.

Christianity is not a mere set of opinions to be embraced by understanding. It is the work of the heart as well as the head.

Facts, according to my ideas, are merely the elements of truths, and not the truths themselves; of all matters there are none so utterly useless by themselves as your mere matters of fact